Loading...On Saturday I was sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a large window with a nice cup of coffee watching the sun slowly rise. I was in a contemplative mood, not dwelling on the quotidian duties bound to occupy me in the hours ahead, but thinking about some of the Big Issues in life, or at least in my life.
I had two thoughts that I’d like to pass along. At the time I wondered if they were possibly, but not necessarily, standing at odds with each other. If so, so be it!
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Bart, look forward to post #2.
While reading this, I remembered watching a science documentary on Netflix, where some world-renowned cosmologists were talking about black holes, the age of the universe and stuff like that, and the issue of meaning was inescapably brought up – you know, what’s the ultimate meaning of it all? Does anything matter? How insignificant are we? And the like; the same existential questions that ultimately hit us when we ponder such grand things.
And I remember, at the time, I was struck by the simplest and most beautiful response from one of the physicists. He was discussing the cosmic perspective and how it can make someone feel that their life doesn’t matter. And he said something along the lines of (can’t recall exactly, paraphrasing) “I thought it didn’t seem like my life mattered or that I mattered at all – until I fell in love”.
What genre of music do you like and often listen to?
1. “Classical” (instrumental) 2. 60s and 70s rock 3. 60-s and 70s singers/songwriters
My view is that “classical” music was good in the baroque and classical period but started sinking with the late Beethoven into Romanticism and beyond and popular music in the modern era was incredibly good from 1963 to 1973 or so (then once you hit disco and following, forget it! 🙂
(I do listen to Jazz as well)
Would it matter (!) to you if I told you the hypotheses of the ‘Big Bang’ as well as the ultimate ‘cold death’ of the universe are being seriously challenged? Many physicists/cosmologists (not cosmetologists, although perhaps some of them also) are taking another look at the origin and expansion of the universe in light of recent discoveries by space telescopes that have challenged our models. Due to the limitations of the speed of light coupled with the expansion rate of the universe, we cannot even see anything beyond the observable limit. And everything outside that limit is probably most of the universe. Anyway, perhaps the old ‘steady state’ model is more realistic, given our evolving understanding.
Yes, I know.
I like the philosophical post this morning! How does consciousness, personhood, and agency fit into your material framework? Is human agency only an illusion? Are we like robots —thinking, speaking, behaving according to the code in our DNA? Is everything we feel a chemical impulse hardwired into our brains? Can we be considered good or bad if it’s all predetermined and out of our control?
for me it’s one of the three big questoins: 1. Something from nothing? 2. Life from nonlife 3. Consciousness. The last is the hardest thing for me to get my mind around.
Free will certainly FEELS right.
The bigger question is why is there order in the universe? It doesn’t have to be that way. Everything could just be random fluctuations in some primordial soup. Of course, the current universe wouldn’t exist if that were true and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But still the order requires a fundamental understanding and that doesn’t necessarily involve an intelligent supreme being.
I don’t believe that any morality objectively exists which is divinely issued OR otherwise objectively present somewhere outside of humans. In your opinion, (if you agree with the previous statement of course), does this mean that we have to construct our sense of morality ourselves? Since you have an experience of going from being religious to an agnostic atheist, have you found this difficult?
No, I don’t think we consciously construct morality. Lots is in our DNA; lots comes out of our environment (broadly and specifically)
Yup! Why not experience things how our attentive mind wants to experience it? Perhaps millions of years of evolution have some wisdom. Buddhism seems to think so.
I cannot escape what is (to me) the likely necessity for some uncaused first cause. However, other than some of the recorded experiential evidence that Dr. Dale Allison points out, I think the data points to what we call “material.”
Reflecting upon my experience before I was born, it doesn’t seem so bad! Obviously memory (in any sense) only goes back so far, but I do have a profound sense of love and peace and quietness looking back that far. And I don’t dread it. It’s perfectly as it was supposed to be, and I am inclined to think that it means something, and that it’s ok.
What better life than to experience it. What greater honor than to experience what others get to experience. We are all in this together. It all comes down to love (connection) and dogs.:)
Have a great day, Dr!
Dan
Dale and I agree on a lot of things. But not this. There are “records” and there are “records.”
I totally agree. Meaninglessness is not the conclusion of a syllogism; it’s a symptom of depression. A brain that’s doing what it’s supposed to do will make meaning out of experience, just as it makes vision out of photons hitting the retina and taste out of chemicals hitting the taste buds.
When religious people say that life without God would be meaningless, what they’re really expressing is that giving up a belief that they’ve come to cherish would result in depression. And in many cases, they’re right, though most folks seem to recover, and go on to live lives they consider meaningful after an adjustment period.
At least they *think* it would lead that way; but religion frequently leads to depressoin as well. Depression normally more related to hormones and human experience than to religious belief and practice.
Bart:
Science, particularly physics, has been my dominant interest in life with religion/christianity following by some distance. Most recently, religion/christianity has dominated, as I’m trying to catch up on subject that did not perk my interest till later in life.
What I see, in your view regarding matter as all there is, would equate to ones veiw of the Bible and Christianity by one who grew up within the confines of a conservative christian enviornment. In other words, one who has not been exposed enough in the subject to “ask questions”. I’m sure you see the nievity in those with no real education outside of the mainstream church doctrines, and I see such in your view of matter, particularly into what separates inate matter and “life”. Life isn’t just chemistry; it’s an organized information system.
You can build the molecules…
But you can’t get them to self-organize, self-correct, self-direct, and self-replicate without something more than chemistry. “Life” is what separates “you” from a rock. Chemistry alone doesn’t explain:
goal-oriented behavior
error correction
boundary maintenance
metabolism regulation
spontaneous emergence of information
the spark of “being alive”
These questions are why I cannot disregard a “God” (Creator) but recognize that whatever that “God” is, is beyond my current undertanding.
People for whom it matters are generally more likely to marry, have children, and raise them to healthy adulthood enabling them also to marry, have children, etc.
An attitude of pure amoral nihilism isn’t conducive to reproductive viability. Once I got that through my head I was able to understand how belief in meaning, purpose, love, truth and beauty could happen in humanity without it necessarily originating from a omnipresent omniscient super sentience.
But does it really really matter? I mostly don’t care. Because it matters to me and to those whom I care about.
Also, on another angle, since we’re metazoans and not protozoans, it’s obvious to me that cooperative organisms are more powerful and can make more adaptive life choices than single celled organisms. My cells cooperate (when they don’t we call that cancer), so therefore I should cooperate with other humans, even those I’m not personally connected to.
in continuation of my previous comment:
Billy Graham, when questioned as to why he accepted a literal Genesis responded, “Because the Bible says its so” and that is much less complicated. That is a highly conservative view. Publicly: 90–95% of scientists adhere to the consrvative view that Life is strictly Chemistry based much on being less complicated (similar to that of bible scholars accepting the Genesis creation). Like you and your contempories, here is a list of Physicist, Biologist and Mathematicians that do not follow the majority conservative (less complicated) view you may want to explore.
1. Roger Penrose
Nobel Prize in Physics.
2. Anton Zeilinger
Nobel Prize for quantum information.
3. Nicolas Gisin
Quantum Physicist.
4. John Wheeler
Father of “it from bit.”
5. Henry Stapp
Quantum physicist.
6. David Bohm
Quantum pioneer.
7. Christof Koch
One of the most influential neuroscientists alive.
8. Giulio Tononi
Founder of Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
9. Karl Friston
Creator of the Free Energy Principle (FEP).
10. Stuart Kauffman
Pioneer in complexity biology.
11. Terrence Deacon
Biological anthropologist.
12. Robert Rosen
Theoretical biologist.
13. Kurt Gödel
Mathematician
Now that you are retired, you might be able to find time to explore this side of our creation origens (life) as I undertook in expanding beyond just my fixation on Science. You may want to expand your resources on origin of “Life”.
All that matter, wherever it comes from and however it will go, has only the meaning we choose to give it. Yes, our existence gives meaning to a whole universe. If that doesn’t inspire awe then nothing can. That’s all the purpose our lives need for them be worth living.
Two things I enjoy:
1. Piano music. I love playing it and listening to it. Maybe I’m a bit of a Platonist at heart.. whenever I hear beautiful music it feels like I’m catching a glimpse/shadow of a deeper, transcendent reality. For me, piano is the fragrance of a flower that points to the real flower itself.
2. Washing dishes. It’s therapeutic. I like the warm steam, simplicity, moving from dirty to clean, and progress you can literally see.
But if I were a dishwasher on the Titanic, I doubt I’d find it enjoyable. Knowing the ship was sinking and the dishes would soon break would make the work feel pointless.
But I think I’d still enjoy playing the piano. Even if the ship were going down, I’d hope the music might calm others and help them think clearly to find a path to safety. Maybe the last thing someone hears as they pass from this life into the next wouldn’t be panic, but beauty.
I know evil makes it hard to believe in God. But I hope you also see the beauty in the world and recognize that it points beyond itself. Your efforts to do good aren’t futile. They genuinely matter.
Just thinking out loud…I always found it odd that to many believers, the duration of something is supposed to give it more meaning.
I discussed with a friend of mine why he felt heaven being eternal automatically gave that meaning and purpose. What if heaven was for 100 years, or 10000 years, or 100000000 years and then ended. Would it no longer have meaning or matter to him? I also asked him…if it’s eternal, how does that add meaning? Like the last episode in The Good Place explored, eternality of life ends up “pointless.” And we know things don’t have to be eternal to provide joy and purpose and meaning, as you pointed out.
I believe meaning and purpose are subjectively manufactured. The fact that this short life is all I have makes it all the more precious IMO.
This reflection resonated with me, especially your emphasis on materialism and on grounding meaning in the present. I approach it from a related direction: if the brain is entirely material, then what we call “free will” may simply be the subjective experience produced by a highly complex, causally driven system. Our sense of choosing may emerge from feedback loops that evolved to create the feeling of agency, even if our actions arise from underlying physical processes.
For me, that doesn’t diminish the importance of our lives; it reframes it. If our values, attachments, and pleasures are the natural outputs of the very system that constitutes us, then their significance doesn’t depend on cosmic permanence. It comes from the fact that conscious beings like us experience them intensely in the here and now.
So even from a deterministic perspective, I arrive at a similar conclusion: transience doesn’t undermine meaning. It makes the present the only space where meaning can occur — and, in some ways, makes it matter even more.
And now we’re *still* on the same page.
Makes sense to me. Does it also tie in with Epicurean philosophy and/or Ecclesiastical thinking, eat, drink, be merry, not to mention Jesus as Cynic, lillies of the field, God/or Nature will provide if we use our brains to think?,
Pretty much. (Ecclesiastes is often thought to have been influenced by Epicurean thought; I love them both!)
I appreciate your honest thoughts, expressed in language that us lay people can understand. Thanks!
Unrelated to your post is a question that came up on Sunday when I heard an evangelical preacher waxing eloquent on John 16:19, where speaking of Jesus, it says: “Now Jesus knew that they desired to ask him…”. The preacher said that the word “knew” comes from Greek “ginosko” and this Greek word means “to know from observing.” Therefore, based on that Greek word, he concluded that Jesus did not use his divine attributes to discern their thoughts, but just observed them as any human would.
I feel like this is making too much out of a single Greek word, but I am no expert. Can you share your expert feedback on this? Thanks!
Yes, that’s the word. But it doesn’t require acquiring knowledge through the human sense of observation. It just meand to know something. (or come to know it) In this case it could be either from a divine reading of minds or close observation.
Love it. I’ve been on a deconstruction journey for a while. It’s been an ebb and flow. But I’ve found a materialist worldview makes more sense than a supernatural one. And I’ve come to see how fragile life really is. I have a friend who thinks along the lines you describe — “why would anything matter if it won’t matter for infinity”. and “how can anything be truly moral”. etc. But as you said things *do* matter to us in the here and now. And they maybe even more so if we only have a limited time as opposed to just hanging out forever as spirits somewhere in “the 3rd heaven” (outer space lol).
I also am a materialist, and I believe that any events that happen within this universe, in nature, or in the lives of individual human beings, have explanations that we humans should be capable of understanding, maybe not now, and perhaps not ever fully. Our ability to understand is remarkable, but not infinite. However, we do have enough knowledge to be able to recognize the limits of what kinds of events can occur within the ‘real world’, as opposed to the imaginary worlds that humans are able to construct in their brains/minds/memories, and even share with each other.
I’m comfortable describing my basic outlook as agnostic, in the sense of my recognition of our (collectively, as humans) inability to know everything there is to know about reality, and therefore, the forced recognition of mystery. A critical question is “what do we do in the presence of mystery?”. If the level of intelligence of humans can be in any way considered a gift of “the cosmos” or of whatever definition of “God” one is able to accept, it would be a mistake to reject that gift.
I am a living self-conscious processor of Information, in a Universe where everything is Information and Energy, and where, if there is a purpose, it could be characterised as “Information becoming conscious through experience”.
Information provides the script, but we make the movie.
The “I” that I perceive is the observer of one strand of events on a single path.
I love this post, and the opportunity to see your inner thoughts on all of this everything, some or all of which I share.
Thanks Bart.
Wonderful thoughts Bart, thanks for sharing.
Ecclesiastes.
Everything is temporary. No one will be remembered. Everything of the human existence is chasing the wind. But still, love your partner, find joy in your toil, and whatever you do, do it as well as you can. For this is the fate of man. Embrace it, for it is the best you can hope for.
Its nice that you can feel good, despite everything being matter. But your “feel good” doesn’t have significance in a world of just matter. It’s just a momentary high, experienced by only you. To allude to Hemmingway, It’s pretty to think your feelings have significance.
What else could feeling good mean? I don’t know why it would have significance. For significance for who or what? It’s significant to me. Is there someone or something else that my feeling good should be signfiicant for?
“At heart I’m a materialist. I think that matter (and of course energy) is all there is.”
I wonder. Serious scientists at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies and elsewhere have been investigating and collecting data on the phenomena of near-death experiences for years. Their work suggests that perhaps a realm beyond and unconstrained by the physical, the material, exists. Could it be? Doggoned if I know but the studies are compelling.
I’d say they aren’t compelling for everyone, since even most neuroscientists aren’t convinced!
Bart, I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for your work. It has helped me see religion less as a set of abstract propositions and more as a record of human psychology playing out under historical pressure—people making sense of fear, hope, suffering, authority, and meaning with the conceptual tools available to them.
That lens has been especially formative for me, because once psychology is taken seriously, religious traditions stop appearing monolithic. Differences between figures, movements, and later interpretations often reflect differences in temperament, experience, and psychological orientation as much as theology. That insight has made your reflections on materialism and meaning resonate with me at a deeper level…
…I do wonder if part of the unease you describe comes from treating one long-range cosmological extrapolation as though it were an ontological verdict. Entropy and dissipation describe transformations and limits on usable energy, not the disappearance of reality into nothingness. Matter, as far as we have ever observed it, doesn’t vanish; it converts, reorganizes, and gives rise to new structures and new gradients. Disorder expands possibilities rather than eliminating them.
Your own image of the brain sharpens this. Eighty to one hundred billion neurons, entirely material, generate conscience, memory, reflection, and value. From within, those neurons constitute an entire lived world; from without, they are simply matter in relation. When we look outward at billions of stars, we do so from within a similar perspective.
Meaning doesn’t need to be rescued from matter; it may be one of the things matter does.
Well, I’m not a scientist, but I believe entropy eventually does lead to what we think of as matter dissipating into random molecules scattered adn unconnected, given many trillions of years.
I often wonder that too. I don’t understand the “If it’s all just material why does anything matter” question at all. I’m not a materialist myself, but if I became a materialist tomorrow, it wouldn’t change anything about what matters to me and what doesn’t. And I’m not sure I REALLY understand why it should. Life mattering to me or not mattering to me, having meaning or not having meaning, has nothing to do with whether or not the material is all there is. I think it’s just a nonsequitor to tie one to the other. Idunno. Maybe I’m just weird.
Recently, the big super scientific quantum physicists have stated that all matter is really energy. I don’t do the math myself, but this is what they say.
Does the kind of energy we have inside us matter? If it’s all Love and understanding and good stuff, does this change the “matter”/energy that we are made of?
[I don’t want to be converting people here, but I think that is part of how JC became eternal – or a good part of it anyways].
My answer when people ask if any of this really matters:
Have you decided it matters? Yes? Then it does.
It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. We’re as much a part of this universe as anything. So our viewpoint on it holds weight.
In physics, many properties are known as emergent: something complex arising from simple underlying physics. There is no reason to think consciousness et al isn’t also emergent. We don’t describe temperature as “not real” just because it’s really just molecules underneath. Likewise, consciousness or free will also isn’t “not real” just because it is emerging out of what neurons do.
In the same vein, I like to see meaning itself as an emergent property. It emerges out of numerous things, our individual consciousnesses, as well as the interaction of the consciousnesses of each other. And, just like temperature, or agency, choices, etc, it is also very real, despite just being physics underneath. And like temperature, which melts ice, meaning can have a real impact on the world.
I wonder how any of these hypotheses could be tested. How could the hypothesis that life has no meaning or no purpose be tested? How could the hypothesis that there is nothing beyond the material world be tested? In light of the hard problem of consciousness, how could the claim that it involves nothing more than the brain be tested? One of the biggest problems with the Abrahamic religions is the propaganda that is made on their behalf. Propaganda indoctrinates people to sectarian theologies that claim to provide answers. But they don’t because they where they can be tested, they are contrary to scientific discovery and where they can’t be tested, they demand faith. The philosophical claims about life being meaningless and material only haven’t been tested and so believing them to be true is simply faith based. The more honest answer is to say that the correct answer to these issues is unknown.
I’d say that “meaning” is not subject to scientific testing, since it’s an internal state.
Very interesting reflection Bart! Looking forward to reading the next one.
Does materialism provide an adequate theory of mind, subjectivity and religious experience? I would imagine that a materialist would first and foremost seek to give a functionalist theory of the New Testament; how it works as a religion
Naturally materialists do think their understanding provide a more adequate theory of mind, subjectivity, and religious (and every other kind) of experience. That’s why they are materialists!
As a materialist you would have to provide a physical descrition of religious experience. How does materialism theory, characterised by the concept of causality, account for religious phenomena typically described as subjective, ineffable and private? A brain scan?
Yes, all our experiences are registered and interpred by our brains, not just religious ones. That’s true for everyone, whether religious or not.